July 23, 2007

Introducing RustyBudget: Author Management Web Software

I like to introduce new software we built here at RustyBrick. It is called RustyBudget, in short it allows bloggers and authors to easily manage the stories they want to write about at their blogs or publishing sites.

RustyBudget is essentially âa writers or editors budgetâ, where a blog owner and blog writers can manage story leads, including author allocation, story notes and overall task management.

Why did I build it? Because I spend a ton of time blogging and managing the topics that should be covered at the blogs I write at. As many of you know, I write at both the Search Engine Roundtable and Search Engine Land. Both blogs are extremely active in terms of traffic and the number of posts we write each day. On both blogs, I help manage what topics we cover and what we don't cover. We manage which authors writes what and what stories they should bring in with it. As you can imagine, the larger the blog, the more authors the more topics, the more confusing things may get.

This software helps organize these tasks and also helps the task more efficient. And efficiency is something I am all about. So initially we built something internally, and then built it out to make it for anyone.

Some people don't like the colors, which is not a big deal, because you can customize the look and we are planning on adding an API. But the bottom line is, that without this tool, I would be spending a heck of a lot more time managing the blogs as opposed to writing at the blogs.